Petri Linna

Knowledge-oriented software engineering process in a multi-cultural context

In software engineering, leading trends can be detected that will affect the characteristic features of a product and its development process. On a product level, the growth of size and complexity is apparent—but on the one hand only. On the other hand, there is also a growing demand for simple and reasonable small software products executed by handheld terminals and smartphones; these applications are in many cases expected to collaborate with databases over the Internet. In addition, different kinds of service concepts (ASP, SaaS) are becoming recognized alternatives to the traditional way of buying software. Increasingly, software products are also distributed in a wide geographical scope to users with different cultural backgrounds and expectations. In software engineering work, as a consequence of this growth in size and complexity, the development work is more and more often distributed. The software business itself is becoming global because of acquisitions, offshoring, and international subcontracting. The globalization of work sets new requirements to the engineering processes: in international teams the organisational and cultural differences of the development subteams have to be recognized. In this paper, the focus is on the software development and its global dimension—especially the roles of multi-cultural and cross-organizational issues in software engineering. Our paper presents the results of the first phase of our three phases research project related to “Culture-Aware Software Engineering.” The main result of the first phase is the multi-cultural software engineering working model introduced in our paper. Culture is seen as one example of the context, i.e. the situation at hand. The concept of culture has also different meanings, which have to be understood in well-organized software engineering. Software engineering work is analyzed as a knowledge creation process, in which both explicit and tacit knowledge are recognized and the transformation between these establishes baselines along the development life cycle.

Trust Building in Globalized Software Engineering: A Cultural Perspective

Abstract Commitment is the manifestation of trust. Therefore the building of trust in global software engineering (SE) companies is a relevant question to study. The objective of this research is to explore the trust-building processes in global SE from a cultural perspective. In this research, staff from five large multinational SE companies were interviewed. In the conceptual part of the article, firstly the domain of SE is introduced, secondly there is a discussion on the concept of trust and trust-building processes and thirdly, cultural dimensions affecting trust-building processes are examined. Finally, findings from the case companies are discussed.

From local to global – path towards multicultural software engineering

One of the trends in software engineering is globalisation. Software development is expert work made in closely collaborating teams. The most natural way to do this kind of work is to implement it in local teams. Distribution of expert work increases the grade of difficulty; an additional grade of difficulty appears if the organisational parts represent different cultural backgrounds. The organisations that are distributed and multicultural must be adaptive. Adaptation can be done in two ways: either to adapt the people to the organisation or to adapt the processes of the organisation to take into account the differences. There is also a lot of knowledge available concerning the differences between cultures. The aim of this paper is to analyse multicultural information and communication technology (ICT) companies. The viewpoints discussed cover the global organisation as an adaptive and learning network and the maturity of the global organisation.

Harmonizing emergency management knowledge representation

Despite technological advances, the interoperability of the information and decision support systems of the various parties in the emergency and crisis management community remains a difficult task. The Finnish Emergency Response Center (ERC) is responsible for taking all emergency calls in any emergency. This operating model differs from the operating models in most countries, in that the ERC operators can alert all the necessary authorities directly. The response plans (RP), which are the procedures and instructions on how to react and whom to alert in case of a particular emergency situation, are scripted by the corresponding authorities (rescue, health, police, etc.) and ERC officers are obligated to follow the plans. Currently the Finnish ERC is specifying a new software system and this study was set up in part to support some of the needs of this large national project. This paper discusses how a business process modeling notation (BPMN) could be adapted in a multi-authority field and whether BPMN is suitable for the demands of emergency authorities. Another aim was to describe and specify the relevant organizational structure and the interfaces required in the response plans. The modeled process descriptions were clarified by investigating literature sources and through discussions with emergency experts. The results show how process descriptions could be used to harmonize the emergency response plans and organization in the Finnish Emergency Center. Process descriptions can also help the ERC to carry out requirement engineering for their new emergency management system.

The role of applications and their vendors in evolution of software ecosystems

The most recent trends in the electronic commerce research have suggested that forming an ecosystem around a platform would create a winning solution. The ecosystem, consisting of vendors and external actors, would create competitive advantage for the platform owner. Furthermore, the sheer number of the actors has been used as the measure of the ecosystems well-being against competing ecosystems. Whereas a number of studies has been devoted to analyse the well-being indicators or structures of software ecosystems and the importance of complementors and complements are acknowledged, there is lack of studies addressing how the complementors affect into the evolution of ecosystems. This conceptual analysis aims to open discussion on this topic by using the mobile application ecosystems—such as Google Play or Apples iOS—as the case subject. While the results suggest some implications for the platform owners and complementors, more work is needed

Knowledge Modeling, Management and Utilization towards Next Generation Web

Nowadays, large amounts of Web contents are being distributed on the Internet. Conventional search engines are not useful for analyzing the relations between related knowledge since a number of Web contents may indicate a similar concept by different words. Users search Web pages for different purposes, such as for education, for accessing information on current affairs, or for gaining knowledge.We believe that the next-generation Web connects each page with not only conventional hyper links but also knowledge links. The knowledge link has to be created by novel knowledge processing technologies. The technologies consist of knowledge gathering, storage, and delivery technologies. In this study, we discuss novel knowledge modeling, management, distribution, and analysis technologies. All these technologies are essential to build the next-generation Web, named Knowledge Web.

Toward a flexible service-oriented reference architecture for situational awareness systems in distributed disaster knowledge management

The aim of our research is to develop methods for authorities to improve situational awareness in support of management activities in disasters and catastrophes. One of the objectives is to anticipate, collect and analyze requirements for advanced situational awareness information systems and use them to define a free and open source based reference architecture for a flexible service oriented system designed to support the loose connection of the situational awareness systems of different authorities. This task is a very demanding one, because the interfaces of the legacy information systems of the different authorities are typically closed, their age, technology and position in their lifecycle are very different and they are mainly intended to support only certain types of activities (rescue, firefighting, police work, health and emergency, safety, etc.). Additional challenges for requirement elaboration include the special characteristics of the information needed in different phases of the emergency management cycle (mitigation & prevention, preparation, response and recovery), quantitative and qualitative differences in situational awareness needs (i) at local versus global level and (ii) between different types of authorities (rescue, police, health etc.), and (iii) the type of management decision (tactical, operational or strategic). This paper deals with the challenges in collecting and managing the information and knowledge needed for the development of situational awareness in disaster and catastrophe management.

Open data based value networks: Finnish examples of public events and agriculture

In recent years, several countries have placed strong emphasis on openness, especially open data, which can be shared and further processed into various applications. Based on studies, the majority of open data providers are government organizations. This study presents two cases in which the data providers are companies. The cases are analyzed using a framework for open data based business models derived from the literature and several case studies. The analysis focuses on the beginning of the data value chain. As a result, the study highlights the role of data producers in the ecosystem, which has not been the focus in current frameworks.

Utilizing MOOCs in the development of education and training programs

Open education and distance learning are not new pedagogical innovations. However, through the introduction of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), they have recently attracted a great deal of attention among educational establishments. MOOCs can be considered a threat to small universities, but, on the other hand, they can also be a means of providing opportunities to develop their core activities. The challenge is how universities will perceive this phenomenon and take advantage of the new chances it brings. This paper examines the utilization of MOOCs from several points of view. The focus is on degree courses and continuing education offered by universities, but in-house personnel training in companies is also discussed. The issue is how to find proper ways to utilize third-party MOOCs in these three domains. Based on our investigations, the paper introduces a preliminary model for exploiting MOOCs in the development of education and training programs.

Toward collaborative situational awareness in a time-critical operational environment

In many fields of business, management has to act in situations and environments that require fast decision making based on inadequate information of the situation. In rapidly changing circumstances, an organizations opportunities for maintaining the situational awareness necessary for decision-making become substantially more difficult. In this type of situation, decisions often end up being made based on insufficient or even incorrect information, with potentially catastrophic results. This research is based on the ongoing SSMC/DDKM (Seamless Services and Mobile Connectivity in Distributed Disaster Knowledge Management) project, which has the context of the advanced usage of situational knowledge in connection with disasters and catastrophes. In practice, this type of situation requires close collaboration between different authorities and also the optimized, integrated use of management systems and resources. In this context there are various authorities involved and this time-critical operational environment requires effective and seamless collaboration related to information transmission for all participants. Typically, the authorities have had conventions and systems to compile information for their own needs, but difficulties have been observed in composing a shared situational awareness that includes the information captured from all authorities. In this paper methods and techniques are discussed which could promote the creation of collaborative situational awareness to support the collaboration of authorities in the management of disaster situations.